Pain Façon Beaucaire – Making french bread with only 4 basic ingredients
August 3rd
Carrying on from my previous post, my fascination with homemade bread continues. I am currently in my second week of of nurturing a sourdough starter and it is bubbling away beautifully. I am too impatient to wait to the third week to make bread again so I pulled out this recipe from Richard Bertinet’s book, Dough. This is a fabulous book for novice bread makers like myself. The book concentrates on technique and timing. There are some great informative step-by-step pictures and includes an in-depth 30 minute DVD. The book uses fresh yeast, I was unlucky on my last visit to the local deli, they had run out of fresh yeast and were not getting a delivery until the following week. With some advice from a friend on twitter I substituted it with instant dried yeast. The result was glorious. This gorgeous bread was made with only 4 ingredients. It created a wonderfully chewy, soft, light as air crumb and the crust is thin and delicate, reminiscent of ciabatta. The whole process didn’t take more than 2 hours. All of the hard work was in the first 30 minutes and the rest of the time the dough was rising in my microwave. The unusual thing about this bread is its shape. The slit in the middle is deliberate and makes
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